An Information Make-Over for Performance Centered Design

Many of the same types of content that have traditionally been placed in manuals or online help systems can actually be incorporated directly into the user interface. Connecting the necessary instructions and information directly to the tasks that they support helps users to perform their work more successfully. An analysis of existing content types can be done to identify opportunities for moving content into the user interface.

More insights

Semantic search seeks to enhance the meaning in content, to more closely align the searcher and the available information resources. This means there is a strong user-centered aspect needed to unlock the benefits. In this NFAIS Conference presentation, Duane Degler explores strategies and considerations for best supporting your users through effective semantic search.

In their UXPA 2018 workshop, Lisa Battle and Rachel Sengers discussed how to ensure a good user experience for dashboards, brainstorm together on the common building blocks of dashboard design, and generate ideas for visualizations to quickly communicate data.

In this Baltimore UX Meetup presentation, Michael Owens and Lesley Humphreys explore recent standards, assistive technologies, and the types of deliverables that can be used to specify accessibility compliant interactions.

Dashboards present a great opportunity to improve user experience by providing quick answers to users’ common questions, but they are also full of potential pitfalls for design. In this session, Lisa Battle will discuss our approach to ensuring a good user experience for dashboards, focusing on 8 principles of UX design that are particularly relevant and illustrating them with real project examples.

First time user experience, while critical to product success, may not be getting the attention it deserves. In this talk, Lisa Battle presents design principles for great onboarding experiences that engage and inform new users, helping them become productive quickly.

Simplicity is one of the most important principles of design. But, realistically, simplicity isn’t always simple. This talk covers what to try when removing functionality or features isn’t an option, provides practical questions to ask when deciding whether and how to simplify an application, and summarizes proven design techniques to use when simplifying applications.

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. Also, as consultants there is much we can do to prepare the project team to hold the line on needed improvements, advocate for user needs, and build on the “big picture” over the long haul after the UX work is completed. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process, and beyond.

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. But we cannot let those things derail us or take things too far from that solid, long-term vision. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process. Topics include: maintaining the rationale behind “blue-sky” thinking, methods for questioning constraints to get to innovative ideas, working with interim designs as intermediate steps to the final vision, and creating shared understanding and buy-in across the team for the long-term vision.

Effective visual design is essential for communicating system and workflow status, alerts, notifications, categories, and prioritization that often must be understood at a glance. Some people believe they can’t use graphics or color for important cues because of accessibility, which is not true. At UXPA’s 2014 conference, we discuss how to create great, visually appealing UX designs that optimize communication of status information for all users.

Many enterprises grow organically, with diverse products managed by different teams. Style guidelines provide a way for the organization brand itself and ensure consistency across its family of apps while leaving in flexibility to accommodate different contexts of use.

In complex applications, such as claims processing, learning management, scheduling systems, engineering software, and other such tools, it is common to provide flexibility to modify the user interface (and the underlying processing) to meet widely varying needs, rather than assuming that one size fits all. When working on the user experience design for such products, we need to ensure that it is easy for clients or users to configure the product as they wish, and be mindful of impacts on the overall user experience.

Are you thinking about how to achieve designs that will get a positive response from your users? Are you wondering how to refine an interface to work well with semantic data? While the ‘magic’ in design can’t be boiled down to a few simple rules, this talk will show you things you can do that will help get your project started on the right path.

This is a tangible guided tour of innovative semantic web applications and user interfaces, as well as interesting interfaces that ask the questions: “What is being adopted from current Internet — and Rich Internet — apps and sites? What new design concepts might be possible now or in the future?” The presentation begins to open up opportunities, issues, and implications for people who will be users of the “linked web of data.” And we continue to ask one of our favorite questions: How can it be made easier and more useful?

We describe emerging accessible design issues, based on a second in-depth analysis of hundreds of accessibility issues documented in real projects, and a comparison of those results to a prior study of 1000+ accessibility issues. This poster demonstrates recent trends in the top 20 UI design situations that are likely to pose problems for users with disabilities; highlights several creative design solutions; and identifies several challenges that lack adequate solutions.

New technologies, reduced workforces, and higher expectations from the public are transforming the way that businesses and government agencies deliver online services. However, online services are not just forms. We describe ways to improve user experience by providing integrated services, preventing errors, using appropriate tone and language, and structuring the interaction.

The web application is increasingly a platform of choice for complex business software, as well as for Internet online services. We are beginning to identify guidelines for web application architectures that support accessibility. This paper describes common accessibility problems encountered in web applications and explains how architecture can help address these problems through reusable accessible objects; supplementing information in links, buttons and labels; providing comparable access to signposting; handling errors; and providing time-out notification and recovery. It also discusses the critical role of architecture in supporting what we believe is the best way of meeting the needs of diverse user groups: multiple dynamic views of the user interface.

Because we are committed to achieving ease of use for all users, we have encountered challenges on real projects that have led us to question the common belief that accessibility benefits all users. Although the user experience goals of accessibility and usability often complement each other, sometimes they are incompatible—the best solution for one user group compromises the needs of another group. This presentation introduces design patterns that specifically address accessibility, and identifies design tradeoffs that suggest the need for alternate views of the user interface.

A tremendous amount of hope — and hype — has been attached to Tim Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web, where machine-readable “meaning” enriches the promise of the web. Creating a positive, successful, trust-worthy experience for users is crucial to its success. What does that mean? What is imperative for it to become the “next generation” web? Most importantly, why must the usability community play a leading role to shape the Semantic Web in a positive, user-centered way? This paper addresses these questions and more.

An analysis of users and their tasks typically generates a lot of rich information… but the process of translating that information into design solutions may seem like “magic.” The truth is that user-centered design is iterative, and requires a mixture of art and science — it takes a series of small steps that both transform and refine the collected information into design solutions. This presentation uses the analogy of building a house to illustrate the process from high-level visioning all the way through detailed design.

Topic maps provide exciting opportunities not just to make information easier to find, but to increase the usability of software. In order to provide users with the information that applies to their particular situations, in forms that they can use, software must be aware of a user’s context (in a broad, multi-dimensional sense). This paper describes how topic maps can serve as the language for linking information to software applications and for sharing information about context among applications.

As more people gain access to computers and the Internet, it has become increasingly important for designers to meet the needs of a diverse international user population. “One-size-fits-all” is no longer accepted by users. This article outlines many of the things that the designer needs to consider for both internationalization of software (making an interface understandable in many cultures) and localization (changing aspects of the interface, such as language and icons, to match the local cultural expectations and experiences).

KnowledgePlanet provides a learning and performance management application used by a number of Fortune 100 companies to support their organizational learning. IPGems was asked to look at the opportunities to improve the interface that hundreds of thousands of people use to plan and keep track of their learning and performance activities. The goal was to increase the user's ability to be in control without having to learn the application, and for KP's customer companies to simplify and reduce implementation time and cost. The result received the Award of Excellence at the 2001 PerformanceCentered Design Competition.

We developed a prototype application to support the management of large public retail events. The application allows both regular and temporary staff to manage large volumes of sales inventory, suppliers, guest lists, and press communication from a simple, easy to understand, flexible interface. The goal was to increase the user's ability to respond quickly to the needs of different groups of people, often at the same time, in a chaotic environment. The result received the top honor, the Platinum Award of Excellence, at the 2000 Performance Centered Design Competition.